SCIENCE OF THE TIMES: How a cup of coffee can spark revolution

By ALEX ROSE

Monday, April 22, 2013

If you're anything like me, then your liquid intake consists almost exclusively of coffee or some form of alcohol. Also, you are apparently a character from "Mad Men" and will probably die in your early 40s.

But before you retire to that great sales pitch in the sky, you will likely swallow a lot of brown stuff, one way or another. Sadly, the less fun of the two beverage types hasn't been what it once was for some time now.

Serious coffee drinkers in the area would probably agree that La Colombe is about the best you're going to get, while most of the other brands should be left on the shelf (or, if used at all, served to people you actively dislike).

But I recently changed my allegiance to WU Brew, a specialty coffee made exclusively for Widener University by West Chester's Golden Valley Farms, using beans from the Las Lajas Farm in Costa Rica.

It's delicious, if a little pricey. That's fine by me, though, because proceeds from WU Brew sales will go to fund scientific research aimed at reversing damaging agricultural processes in Central America.

As environmental science professor Dr. Stephen Madigosky explained at an Earth Day sampling event at Widener on Monday, Las Lajas is an island of traditional shade-grown coffee in a sea of homogenous sun-oriented farms that have sprung up over the last 40 years or so.

The newer farms are the result of a commercialization drive that inadvertently led to vast deforestation as farmers removed vast swaths of foliage to make way for more coffee plants.

It probably sounded like a great idea at the time -- more acreage means more crop yield means more profit, right? -- but it also decimated the available nutrients for the plants, as well as habitats for many local species that were forced to relocate.

As a bonus, it turns out that the plants don't do very well sitting out in the sun all day and die off much quicker than their shadier cousins (which is probably why they evolved that way to begin with).

So here's what happened: The coffee, devoid of nutrients, tastes terrible. But the farmers are sort of stuck with this system, because they have to sell more of their crappy beans at 35 cents per pound just to scrape by, which means they need to keep the production at current levels or go under.

The current corporate culture doesn't give a damn about long-term sustainability, just short-term profit, so they'll go wherever the price is best.

But Golden Valley founder John Sacharok claims those same farmers could be making a fairer $2 per pound while ensuring sustainability if they just come back to traditional farming methods.

That is what Sacharok and brother-in-law Frank Baldassarre, the numbers man at the company, are hoping to accomplish with the help of Widener.

Shade-grown coffee has some major advantages over its sun-drenched cousins, not the least of which is that it doesn't taste like it was filtered through a sack of diseased monkeys. But more importantly, according to Sacharok, it is simply better for everyone involved. The farmer can charge a little more to fill the ever-increasing demand for organic products, the environment benefits from increased biodiversity on the farm land, and the consumer gets a better cup of coffee, free of pesticides and herbicides.

Madigosky plans to return to Costa Rica in January to begin building datasets on various farming techniques, which Sacharok will use as a baseline that can be scaled for projected remediation costs at other farms.

It will take time and money -- which the business world hates to hear -- but the payoffs could be enormous, especially for the more poverty stricken areas of Central America.

Baldassarre is also hoping that students who see the difference between sustainable and subsistence farming firsthand will carry that knowledge with them into board rooms after college, where they can make more informed decisions beyond what affects the bottom line.

Meanwhile, I'll be interested to see whether a revolution really can begin in a cup of coffee, or if this is all a tempest in a French press.